I have a similar situation where I seem to have lost several hours of work (editing and deleting hundreds of photos).
I imported a few thousand photos residing in 26 folders on my MacBook Pro hard drive, one folder at a time. The imports were all successful and created 26 new events within iPhoto. After the import, I edited and deleted many of the recently imported photos from within iPhoto. My edits in iPhoto consisted of Rotate, Enhance, and Straighten plus Naming some Faces within Info. iPhoto crashed while I was Naming some Faces within Info. When prompted, I did send the error report to Apple.
When I re-opened iPhoto, all 26 of my recent imports seem to have disappeared. I can see the new events in iPhoto but they're all empty. However, when I try to re-import the photos, the import process throws up a "Duplicate Photo" notification window asking "Would you like to import the following duplicate photo?" The notification window shows the photo waiting to be imported on the left and an empty box with no image on the right. The import facility clearly thinks that the photo already exists, but the event folder within iPhoto is empty with no photos.
Opening the iPhoto Library folder with "Show Package Contents, I can see the following files/folders there:
AlbumData.xml
Attachments >
Auto Import >
Database >
iLifeShared >
Info.plist
iPhotAux.db
iPhotoLock.data
iPhotoMain.db
iPod Photo Cache >
Library.data
Library.iPhoto
Library6.iPhoto
Masters >
Previews >
ProjectDBVersion.plist
Projects.db
Thumbnails >
Under the Masters folder, a couple of levels down, I can see some empty folders, but can also see files of recent photos that were imported under the second filepath listed below.
Masters > 2013 > 05 > 22 > 20130606-xxxxxx
Masters > 2013 > 06 > 06 > 20130606-xxxxxx
Masters > 2013 > 06 > 09 > 20130606-xxxxxx
Drilling down from the Previews folder, I can also see files of recent photos that were imported as below.
Previews > 2013 > 06 > 06 > 20130606-xxxxxx
Previews > 2013 > 06 > 09 > 20130606-xxxxxx
The relevant software details are listed below:
iPhoto 11 version 9.4.3 (720.91)
OS X 10.8.3
Why are the recently imported photos not showing up in iPhoto and if they are there how can I access them?